Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Communication mash up

I have just been appointed to a new committee on campus that is investigating unified communication. Our aged phone switch is dying and it seems like a good point to look at whether we can update communications systems on campus by bringing together your desk phone, cell phone and your computer and also introduce all kinds of features like converting voicemail to e-mail, integrating instant messaging and web conferencing.

This has the potential to be of great interest to the library. Many of the librarians are feeling somewhat trapped at the reference desk. they like to roam, but the Meebo chat window and the askalibrarian e-mail inbox, never mind the phone keeps drawing them back. If they could use smartphones to deal with all those media of communication they could roam a lot further, into the stacks, the labs, and into other buildings.

I would like to hear your comments about this project.

2 comments:

Bryan Alexander said...

When do you think members of the community/visitors would be most likely to use voice for communication? Or perhaps the best question is "where."

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